"Why does the painter need a model, if he's going to deviate from it?" asks Louis Aragon in his novel Henri Matisse. In his collection of short stories, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, the translator Damion Searls takes short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, André Gide and others as a point of departure, deviating from them to produce a bewitching snapshot of modern life.

In A Guide to San Francisco, Searls transforms Vladimir Nabokov's short story, A Guide to Berlin, following his five-part structure to evoke a city at sea in an ocean of mist and rain.